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Best Buy is blowing these out (retail price was $799.99 so this won't last!). They are no longer available online so you'll have to call your local store to see if they have them in stock still (SKU 2658129). Best of luck on this great deal! (note: you may upgrade the RAM to 8GB and you may use your HDTV as a display since these natively have HDMI. Also may be eligible for free Mountain Lion upgrade if new in box).

so tempting... I just placed an order with the Dell Alienware Desktop, but I am so to Apple ...

By the way, how hard to expand the memory to 8GB?

spin the disk on the bottom of the computer and you can expand up to 16GB no problem.
I put 16GB and a Dual drive.. 1TB+256GB SSD in mine.(same model) Adding a second drive is a lot more challenging. But I was able to setup my own fusion drive.

While XBMC for Mac OS X does have the new AudioEngine, which features many new improvements in audio quality for XBMC, HD audio passthrough is not currently possible on Mac OS X and iOS due to limitations on the OS level. Those who want HD audio passthrough will need to use a Linux-based OS or Windows on their Mac hardware. Note that XBMC for Mac OS X/iOS is still able to playback HD audio, just not via passthrough (it will be converted to another format before playback).

3.3 Audio issues and/or slow video playback

Shortcut: #Audio

See also: Settings/System#Audio output

Make sure that your audio settings are correct. Wrong audio settings will have severely negative effects on video playback:
Your speaker setup is really correct
If passthrough: you only enable the audio codecs your receiver supports.
Select only the correct audio output device for analog and passthrough
Linux specific On AMD GPUs you must disable all "HD" passthrough options and "output stereo to all speakers". AMD drivers under Linux don't support HD audio passthrough. AC3 and DTS should be safe to enable. NVidia GPUs should be okay for HD audio (if supported by the hardware).
Having issues on XBMCbuntu? See XBMCbuntu#XBMCbuntu_no_audio_devices
Mac OS X specific If you hear sound only coming from the left side of speakers/headphones then you probably need to change your audio settings from 2.1 to 2.0.
Windows specific Most user can fix their issue by just switching to "DirectSound" in the audio settings. See Windows Settings for AudioEngine for more in-depth information.
OS X and iOS known issues Gapless playback for music isn't working.
AAC to AC3 transcoding is broken for the time being, which means no multichannel support for AAC.
All sorts of hickups during music track transitions (gets worse with activated crossfade).
Music output lacks "audiophile" support (output is resampled to the setting from audio midi setup for all tracks)